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International audience; As a research field, entrepreneurship emerged from an increasing interest in fostering new business ventures. Over the past decade, interest in entrepreneurial phenomena also triggered several studies in the IMP research stream. We examine connections between these two research streams in terms of the phenomena in focus, key concepts, and approaches to identify research areas fruitful for advancing our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. In pursuit of this aim, we analyzed 48 IMP-based entrepreneurship studies and the abstracts of the 227 most cited papers in eight main entrepreneurship journals; among the latter, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 30 articles, in which we found connections with IMP studies. Based on our analysis, we identify four directions for future research, where confronting and bridging the key concepts has the potential to contribute to conceptualizing entrepreneurial phenomena and related theory development. The four areas are: variety in the context of new ventures; multiplicity of networks embedding new ventures; connecting the new venture to its context; and the new venture's learning and management.

The supply context of companies has changed substantially during the past two decades because of outsourcing, globalisation and digitalisation, and through growing concern for sustainability and public procurement. These changes, combined with recognition of the potential benefits to be derived from more extensive involvement with suppliers, have made the task of purchasing and supply management broader and more complex. This paper's aim is to examine how the evolving supply context affects the scope of purchasing and supply management and what the consequences for management are. We argue that effective use of supplier relationships involves three main issues – interacting in supplier relationships, dealing with supply network interdependences and handling dynamic changes in the supply context. Coping with these matters requires: (i) conceptual tools that support monitoring and sense-making of what is on-going at the supply side of the firm; (ii) the individual and organisational skills and capabilities required to develop workable solutions; and (iii) organisational arrangements to support the development of these solutions.

International audience; New business ventures have rather limited resources, generally suffer from liabilities of smallness and newness and rely on external business relationships, typically with suppliers, for developing and acquiring necessary resources. Yet, to date, research on how new ventures develop initial relationships with suppliers and how these affect the nascent business has been limited. Taking the business network perspective and relating it to studies of supply chain and supplier involvement in product development, our study contributes to the rather limited body of knowledge on new ventures' supplier relationships. Empirically, we draw on a longitudinal, in-depth single-case study of the first two years of operation of a start-up. Our study shows that the development of the key initial supplier relationships starts from open-ended expectations of mutual future relational benefits and involves a stepwise ‘inter-definition’ of solutions in interaction between the parties. We observe that interdependences arise between the new venture and its key suppliers and these enable but also limit, the development paths of both partners. We argue that the key initial supplier relationships extend a new venture's resource and capability base and are an integral part of a new venture's business model.

Various empirical studies have evidenced that interaction is a critical process in the development of buyer–seller relationships in business-to-business markets. Research examining the different aspects of interaction processes and the consequences of interaction in business relationships for the development of the businesses involved has tended to black-box the interaction process. Limited attention has been given to how interaction behaviors of individuals arise and the interplay between cognition and behaviors in interaction. At the same time, recent research offers some insights into the use and role of heuristics in contexts analogous to those individual actors face when they interact in business relationships. In this paper we review current research on interaction processes in business relationships as well as on heuristics in the management context and argue that focusing on heuristics used in interaction in business relationships offers valuable insights on how interaction behaviors emerge. In particular, we discuss the notion of heuristics as an “adaptive toolbox,” and how it relates to adaptations in business relationships. We also discuss implications for management and outline a future research agenda.

Few studies have looked at the innovation process in the early stages of new business ventures in the context of business networks. Reporting on eight years of development of a new venture, we examine how the development of initial business relationships in an ever-changing business network affects technological innovation. We conclude that technological innovation is contingent on the development of business relationships that are a critical mechanism permitting a new venture not only to access but also to produce knowledge essential for innovating. For management this implies the need to strike a judicious balance between internal focus and closure to produce novel solutions and external focus and openness to experiment in business relationships.

Various beneficial consequences can accrue when a customer is perceived to be an attractive customer, particularly in a business-to-business context. Opinions differ as to what makes for customer attractiveness and a number of different features have been suggested as contributing to it. Currently there exists no comprehensive view of what factors constitute customer attractiveness and how this may be valued, measured and evaluated. Drawing on various facets of customer attractiveness suggested in the literature, this paper seeks to delineate the customer attractiveness construct and develop an instrument to measure it. The paper concludes by discussing how the scale developed can be used as a tool to address some critical issues in assessing customer attractiveness.

Our research deals with the role of actors in change in business relationships and networks. In this study, we explore how cognitive elaboration of experience of a relationship affects the relationship development. The link between behaviors and cognitive elaborations has been the object of recent research in marketing, but little attention has been given to the issue of cognition and behaviors when actors interact in business relationships. Given the role of relationships and their dynamics for the development of business networks, we believe that the issue deserves more attention. Also, compared to the interest in the space dimension of business networks, i.e., network pictures, perceptions of time have been under-investigated. We report findings from 84 bilateral interviews with managers involved as customers or suppliers in 21 relationships with ICT Security at two points in time. We collected their interpretations and reinterpretations of past developments, outcomes, and desired outcomes of the relationships in which they were involved. Our data suggest that the link between managers' cognitive elaborations and relationship dynamics is less direct than commonly assumed. We argue that evolution of a relationship cannot be explained by individual interpretations of the parties involved in the relationship; a preliminary finding is that actors' intentions appear more to shape the interpretations, rather than the contrary.

Every business builds on a specific set of resources. New businesses in particular have to assemble external resources that are mostly new to them. This resource assembly requires developing business relationships with other actors that control and can provide the needed resources. Adopting a resource interaction perspective, this paper examines a case of a new business venture in the automobile industry. The case study shows that when forming a new business the actors possess only partial knowledge of how to assemble the resources. Consequently, the actors must engage in extensive adaptation and interaction with others to enact workable resource interfaces and combinations. This necessity makes the new business formation process nonlinear and onerous. Further, the case demonstrates that new business formation is a collective process involving not only the emergence of a formal business organization but also reorganizing the applicable resource market. Since third parties involved in developing the necessary resource combinations can be considered part of the new business venture, setting the boundaries of the new venture becomes arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of such boundary setting has implications in entrepreneurship studies with regard to the unit of analysis and the concept of opportunity.

Combining resources to develop complex solutions (e.g., products or services) involves a varied set of business actors. Research tends to assume that actors are more or less autonomous in combining the resources they use. Presenting findings from a study of the construction of the first two pre-discharge homes for patients with cognitive and motor disabilities, we show that the autonomy of the single actor in combining resources is limited and that resource combinations are collectively enacted. Consequently, the features of the emergent resource combinations depend on the set of actors involved. We also argue that each actor takes part in resource combination both as provider and as user of resources; the two roles imply different perspectives that lead to different focal points which, in turn, impact how resources interface. The two roles orient the conduct of parties and, as confronted in business relationships, they shape the development of business relationships and resource combinations.

‘Alignment’ and ‘misalignment’ are terms commonly used both in strategy and in marketing. In B-to-B marketing, in particular, researchers investigated alignment/misalignment between customers and suppliers and recently discussed the effects of misalignment. Research in this field remains however fragmented. There is ambiguity about the objects to be aligned, the processes that characterize their change, the effects on the relationship development and the methods used to assess them. In general, the empirical research that has examined the two concepts in business relationships is limited. In this study we will develop a theoretical framework to assess alignments/misalignments in parties' interpretations of a problem and its solution for the customer, in order to address the following questions: How and why do alignment and misalignment change over time? When can misalignment be positive for the relationship development? We use data from a longitudinal study involving 84 customers and suppliers in the ICT Security Industry. The first finding is that there are no patterns in how alignment changes, but there is a slight tendency toward misalignment over time. Second, change in the alignment is mostly linked to parties' perceptions of the available resources and how these resources are combined, along with parties' interpretations of critical events. Finally, the research suggests that when parties are aware of misalignment, when misalignment is perceptual and when there are no external constraints to action, the effort to align practices produces positive effects, even when misalignment persists.

The supply side is on top of the management agenda in most companies, reflecting an increasing strategic attention to benefits that can be gained from cooperation with suppliers. In particular, partnering has been suggested to be the superior solution for making the most of supplier relationships. It is argued in this paper that this recommendation oversimplifies the issues involved and, if followed blindly, may be bad for practice. Developing partnerships with suppliers is resource-intensive and can be justified only when the costs of extended involvement are exceeded by relationship benefits. The article examines the economic consequences following from different degrees of involvement with suppliers. Our conclusion is that a company can be highly involved with only a limited number of suppliers and needs a variety of relationships—each providing its different benefits. Furthermore, it is discussed how the extent of involvement relates to the economic importance of the supplier, the continuity of the relationship and the sourcing strategy of the buying firm. The core of our argument is that the capacity to cope with a variety of relationships in differentiated ways has a profound impact on performance. When the approach of the buying firm shifts from purchasing to making the most of supplier relationships, a richer analytical framework is required to deal with the complexity of the new task.

The purpose of this article is to explore the contributions that could be made to the conceptual frame of reference for business strategy management by one of the research programmes which focuses on the organization-environment interface, and to which a network approach has been applied. We start by examining some of the assumptions underlying the current “strategy management doctrine”. The network model of the organization-environment interface is then reviewed and three central issues of the strategy management doctrine are discussed from the viewpoint of the network model: (1) organizational boundaries, (2) determinants of organizational effectiveness, and (3) the process of managing business strategy. The conclusion reached is that in all three areas changes are required in the assumptions of the business strategy model. Our arguments stem from a basic proposition about the situations described by the network model: continuous interaction with other parties constituting the context with which the organization interacts endows the organization with meaning and a role. When this proposition applies, any attempt to manage the behaviour of the organization will require a shift in focus away from the way the organization allocates and structures its internal resources and towards the way it relates its own activities and resources to those of the other parties constituting its context. Such a shift in focus entails a somewhat different view of the meaning of organizational effectiveness: what does it depend on and how can it be managed?